Capacity Building Programme on Air Quality Standards for GCC Countries

In 2021, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) West Asia Office with the support of the GCC Secretariat and in collaboration with the World Health Organization (WHO) and Environment Agency Austria (EAA) organized a capacity-building programme on air quality standards. This guidance document compiles the presentations made at the training programme. This manual is divided into six chapters: - Chapter 1 introduces the importance of air quality for both human health and the environment, including the role of air pollution in climate change - Chapter 2 describes the general purpose of air quality standards, procedures and considerations for establishing such standards, as well as different types of standards and thresholds. - Chapter 3 provides an overview of air quality standards in the European Union (EU), including compliance checking, in the United States of America (USA) and selected further countries. - Chapter 4 gives an overview of current air quality standards in GCC countries and compares them to EU and US standards as well as WHO guidelines. - Chapter 5 summarizes the WHO air quality guidelines and interim targets. - Chapter 6 describes methods for source apportionment in general and techniques to account for the contribution of desert dust in particular.